Food Safety and Processing Perspective

Terrence O’Keefe, WATT’s content director, provides his perspective on everything from animal agriculture trends that impact our food chain to food-safety related issues affecting chicken and egg production. O’Keefe has covered the poultry industry as an editor for more than a decade and also brings his experience in plant management and poultry production to comment on today’s issues.

How can you get a millennial to change their mind?

Richard Kottmeyer said that from studying how the typical millennial consumer gets their information from various sources, he has figured out how millennials change their mind on a topic. | Adiruch, Dreamstime.com

Millennial consumers are said to care about different things than their parents did, but one expert says he can demonstrate how to change their opinions.

You have likely heard a statement like, “Millennials care where their food comes from.” I have always been skeptical of broad statements like this. I actually think it is more accurate to say, “Millennials think they are supposed to care where there food comes from.” I think this is an important distinction, because the first statement implies a firmly held value and the latter implies just following the herd.

I asked Richard Kottmeyer, vice president of agriculture and food at Luxoft, who is an expert in analyzing big data to predict trends, about millennials and their interest in how food is raised and prepared. He said it is possible to come up with general statements that typify what the typical millennial consumer might have regarding food. But, he said something else that I found a lot more interesting.

Kottmeyer said that from studying how the typical millennial consumer gets their information from various sources -- which for this generation is primarily online -- he has figured out how millennials change their mind on a topic. He even offered to demonstrate the process for getting a millennial to change their mind: He said that all we have to do is give him the topic about which we want to change the millennials’ mind.

Here is where I need your help: For which chicken marketing topic (not including eggs) do we want this process demonstrated? Should it be modern genetics and broiler welfare (slower-growing broilers), raised-without-antibiotics broilers, contract broiler farms aren’t family farms, or should it be something else?

Let us know by clicking here and filling in the issue that you would like Kottmeyer to use to demonstrate how to change the minds of millennial consumers. Then join us at the 2017 Chicken Marketing Summit in Ashville, North Carolina, and decide for yourself if Kottmeyer has really come up a process for changing a millennial’s mind.